Do you aspire or dream to be a writer? Or inspired by the authors whose words were timeless masterpiece that touches a part of your soul whenever you read them? Or just curious about the creative process of every writer? Here's what some of the renowned authors has to say about "writing" and advice on how to be one:
1. All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind. --Kahlil Gibran
2. I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work. --Pearl S. Buck
3. If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write. --Martin Luther
4. A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit. --Richard Bach
5. Writing is something you do alone. It’s a profession for introverts who wanna tell you a story but don’t wanna make eye contact while telling it. --John Green
6. The story must strike a nerve — in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk. --Susan Sontag
7. You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things. --Neil Gaiman
8. Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.--David Foster Wallace
9. Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow. --A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
10. If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. --Isaac Isimov
11. Write while the heat is in you… The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. --Henry David Thoreau
12. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. --Ernest Hemingway
13. Writing is the painting of the voice. --Voltaire
14. How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. --Henry David Thoreau
15. We write to taste life in the moment and in retrospect. --Anais Nin
16. There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written – it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself. --Mark Twain
17. There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. --Maya Angelou
18. Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. --William Wordsworth
19. Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. --Anton Chekhov
20. There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed. --Ernest Hemingway
21. Unwritten thoughts slip away like last night’s dreams. A good sentence can carry the light of insight, undimmed, across years, decades, and centuries. --The Stoic Emperor
22. Without great solitude no serious work is possible. --Pablo Picasso
23. Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works. --Virginia Woolf
24. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. --Oscar Wilde
25. A writer is a world trapped in a person. --Victor Hugo
26. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living; it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities. --Dr. Seuss
27. Writing for me is a kind of compulsion, so I don’t think anyone could have made me do it, or prevented me from doing it. --J.K. Rowling
28. A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.--E.B. White
29. Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, “It might have been”. --John Greenleaf Whittier
30. You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page. --Jodi Picoult
31. The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising. --Stephen King
32. It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way. --Ernest Hemingway
33. The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love. --Ray Bradbury
34. Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. --C.S. Lewis
35. Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself. --Franz Kafka
36. Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window. --William Faulkner
37. Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks. --Plutarch
38. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. --Virginia Woolf
39. If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood. --Peter Handke
40. The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. --Vladimir Nabokov
41. I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. --Anne Frank
42. Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. --Benjamin Franklin
43. A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends. --Friedrich Nietzsche
44. If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. --Stephen King
45. Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. --Louis L’Amour
46. Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that is is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. --E.L. Doctorow
47. The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it. --Margaret Atwood
48. Fairy tales are more than true: Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. --Neil Gaiman
49. The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. --Anne Lamott
50. You will fail. It’s inevitable. It’s what you do with it. --J.K. Rowling
And I love what Margaret Atwood has to say about starting out or maintaining our momentum in writing:
"If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word"
So let's start now!
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